"In recent years, an odd consensus has arisen where many believe that games are easier than they used to be. In many cases it's true, and it isn't surprising, as extreme competition between titles has created the need for games to be immediately entertaining as soon as you press the start button. As a consequence, many older - and potentially newer - players consider these games of yesteryear much more difficult. The immense challenge Wii U owners have experienced with virtual console games is evidence of that. Are these newer adventures really easier? Or has the design philosophy for video games improved instead?" Interesting take. I will tell you this, though - take a game like Dragon Age (the only one that matters, so the first one). It's immediately accessible to newcomers at the easy and normal setting, but try stepping it up to nightmare mode, and you're suddenly back in old-fashioned hardcore territory where you'll need to apply every little bit there is to know about the game to be able to finish it (tip for DA fanatics: finish the game without a single character going down in combat, on nightmare. I did it. It's hell). My point is: sometimes, you have to up the difficulty or create your own challenges to find the rewarding difficulty of gaming yore.

I hardly play any games today, but in the past I did more so. The good difficulties (IMHO) are those when one needs to train one's skills (either mental or reflexive) to beat the challenges of the game. Other-times games were difficult because one didn't know what to do, this can be good if it's part of an intelligent puzzle, but very frequently old games over did this making progress dependent on pure guesswork, which sucked.

Wolfenstein was original, and that made it neat, but I wouldn't want to play it again, the player spends way too much time looking for hidden passageways which mandated the ridiculously boring strategy of hitting space along the contours of the whole map.

Doom had a good balance, none of the secrets were necessary and they were well designed to make the player think "how do I get there?", excellent.

Quake was very enjoyable, it could have had more puzzles but that would have detracted from it's fast pace. I will say I've always found it to be an easy game, and I say this not being a great player myself.

I was never able to beat prince of persia. The gameplay was somewhat challenging, but the problem was always with the timer taking away your ability to freely explore the maps, without having access to a walkthrough to cheat, the puzzles required a great deal of exploring but when you actually took the time to do so you'd have to restart from the beginning of the whole damn game, effectively making every level exponentially more annoying due to the restarts. Modern games would have checkpoints, which is nice for me because it allows much more experimentation.

RPG like king's quest series were difficult because when you got stuck ever so often, there was nothing left to do but try every item in the inventory on every pixel/screen in the game - the combinations were generally clever, the element of guessing for too long became tedious.

Mortal combat was difficult for one reason alone: skills, but was it any more difficult than similar games today?

Lemmings difficulty resulted from a combination of puzzles and execution skills.

The 7th guest was all puzzles, a couple were quite difficult.

Alone in the dark had some confusing inventory based puzzles but gameplay wasn't really difficult.

I played more too, I don't really know if the games today are easier, but when I've gone back to replay older skill games I often seem to find them easier than I did originally, maybe because the old AIs are more predictable to the trained eye?